Glue all over your car... for one, it's stupid and nobody is going to buy cars with glue all over them. Secondly, it doesn't present the level of confidence in self driving cars that I would have hoped.
I would love to get personal paid email from Google, but 5 dollar a month is too much in this day and age just for email.
I just want gmail without content scanning and ads. I'd pay like 2 dollars a month, but not 5. If google had an office suite to sell me I might go for that. As it stands MS email and Outlook 360 for 5 bucks a month is looking better and better.
Google Apps.. aren't worth money and they aren't really designed to be. Gmail sucks compared to other email clients. Google Calandar not being intregrated well is just dumb. Outlook and every other clone of that style interface is still a better designing, including outlook.com
I think google would prefer to just data mine and offer lite version of software like they currently do. It's an easy and scalable business model that will probably never get old. Making serious apps means offering serious support. Being a medium for advertising requires very little work from Google to adapt to the market. The market comes to them and throws money at them because they are the top search engine, top email provider and top mobile platform.
The problem is their platform sucks and we all pay for it with our time. It's not free.. it's slow and cumbersome and not a google tool for production.
Office and Outlook are still far better for their respective uses than anything Google offers. Google needs to mature to higher end apps that mimic desktop apps or I think they will start to lose considerable users to MS. MS is more compelling for the features they offer for the money and most desktop users have to use Windows anyway, so they will continue to have a huge advantage in integration. Google has done nothing to address that. If anything they continue to dodge the problem and rely on their rather immature/lame Chrome app platform. It's great for a browser plug-in architecture, but it's not great for stand alone apps. Google should stop trying to use Chrome for so much.
They are over compartmentalizing and underutilizing. They are being too cheap/efficient and they will wind up losing market share at a time where they had the money and influence to hold it. Google needs to go back to focusing on core services ASAP. The platform is dated and not improving.
Either they are creating a bubble or they aren't investing enough in education. They have over a billion people and socialized education. How can they not be able to hire fast enough? The average citizen is still totally poor.. it's not like China is some posh low population density area where you might reasonably have such problems.
That's just using an open document format, not using 'free' software. Public funds don't normally dictate what tools people prefer. Market trends do that. Like.. the government doesn't make everyone use special government funded phones. Government employees mostly use the same phones available from major retailers. The government doesn't have it's own special shovels either and while they are big shovel customer or a big software customer and they should get a say in things.. they don't have a right to dictate that simply because the taxpayers use those items via government.
Government has no more right to dictate how software or shovels are made than individuals. If anything government has less rights than people, not more. Government should do what the market trends are doing unless otherwise directly legislated. If everything is using Windows, you use Windows. If everyone is using iPhone, you using iPhone. You don't fight the existing social patterns just because you want to make a name for yourself or your management skills. You will lose.
If the government takes over OS and Office software, it has to maintain that code. It has to rapidly patch security holes or RELY on some group or service to do that for them. You don't just write opensource software and walk away because it's opensource. It's still filled with bugs and when used on a large scale it will require support. You can't get away with just user driven forums. You need to be able to provide people real support if they need it. Many businesses rely heavily on office software, maybe even more than governments. If government is going to push a scenario where it controls it's own software, then it's going to have to spend a lot of money to keep that software up to date or at least do private audits of the code often and review all new code.
It's better to let private industry develop software and just force them to meet the public's demands occasionally. The idea Windows and Office cost too much is ridiculous. Your desks or cubicle probably costs a couple grand and it's just like junk wood coated with fabric. Your office probably spends more in K-CUPs per week than they spend on IT upgrades per month.
It would be nice if Google would go ahead and makeGoogle Docs not suck by pressuring MS to make Office free. I think google knows that MS could just open the flood gate of free online office at any moment and crush all their hard work.. so Google Docs will remain mostly crap. Libre and Open are good enough, but you aren't saving anything. You lose one job or customer because of bad formatting or documents they can't open.. and you've lost a huge amount of that money you're pretending to save... by cannibalizing productivity and user happiness. Also every normal person who uses Office who comes to work for you now has to learn you special opensource way of doing everything... and when they leave they will probably not use the same software you made them use.
I don't like how we aren't adding up the cost of forcing users to relearn all this stuff or fragmenting the market.
The problem is retooling does cost money. Libre and Openoffice do have plenty of bugs and lack features some users want. The biggest problem is that MS software just doesn't cost that much.
Labor and hardware cost a lot, software is dirt cheap for how much you use it. If you want good software, stop trying to get it for free and instead just send feedback to the companies making the leading products. You can get the latest features without the things you hate this way.
The the only real problem with MS Office is that there is no free home version, beside that it is a better office product and products like publisher or powerpoint are years ahead of anything in competing products. I've yet to see anything more compelling than WordPerfect and that did not win against Office then and probably won't for any professional uses now.
There isn't any real money to be saved, relative to other savings, by switching to Linux and other open source and the security argument has only lessened. Linux has proven less secure than predicted over the last 5 years and Windows has proven more secure than predicted. Linux is losing the battle of compelling features. Other than paranoia about the NSA and backdoors in MS products, I don't see any real benefit other than general diversification. Users really can hate software changes and they are kind of being made into pawns in this silly battle over a rather small amount of money, often made on principle more than on dollar and... sense.
I would make sure I was doing what the users wanted, they are the ones expected to use the software and be productive, so they should have a pretty heavy say in things. I think this is not often the case and IT and management make top down decisions that they wind up regretting. Large scale changes like OS and office software or financial software transitions are not fun at all. You really want to be sure you're doing that for ALL the right reasons.
What about the other 10,000 pollutants in the cities? They forgot to rule those out. Saying that brake dust is bad and X amount of brake dust is released and X amount of cancer exists in the cities is about as much fiction as it is science. That's extremely loose correlation molded into a rather specific headline, could be as much marketing as it is science.
The reason people claim there is a liberal bias is because there are more liberals in America and they make up a larger TV audience. That's why so much programming is liberal and have been for decades.
Almost all the news stations have a liberal bias because liberals make up more of the population and have for decades and intelligent conservatives have long known that. That's why they don't want increased voting numbers. They would lose more elections. Even Fox has and started out with almost all liberal programming. The crazy conservative news thing only came later and Fox is the youngest of all the news stations. I think liberal shows with conservative news is a solid propaganda delivery model for mass changing people's minds, even if only a little, propaganda over time does work and often works surprisingly well. That is why trillions per year are globally spent on marketing, even when you can almost never quantify how much the advertising helped your revenue.
Liberal news makes more money because it appeals to a larger audience, it's just supply and demand.
Demographics are also all going more liberal.. are we supposed to give conservative equal air time just out of tradition now? It's not going to happen. Media is a for profit endeavour, they print what sells and liberal media contains to grow in popularity decade after decade. It's a clear sign of the long term trend of the country. There are no more accurate polls than what people are watching.. TV ratings and torrent downloads are quite accurate views of what people are thinking an interested in at any given time.
In any case.. if there was a conservative majority in the US.. there would never have been a liberal media. The two ideas just don't go together at all. Media is controlled by mega corporations most often with conservative CEOs and board members. They want money, so they base their programming mostly off ratings, not political ideology.
That may not translate to voting all that well, but if you think the media is liberal then you have to think most of the country is liberal and thus it's only fair that they get a larger chunk of media representation. That's democracy.
Wait and see is almost never a smart strategy for large scale management and it's especially foolish for something like energy where diversity is well proven to be cost effective. Consider how the markets and fuel supplies work. By diversifying you take market leverage away from countries rich in fossil fuels, especially the easy to export kinds... like oil. Wait and see can work great for personal level decisions, because you're only screwing up your own life.
It's safe to say that disturbing the chemical makeup of our environment is less than ideal. An electric infrastructure lets of manage the equilibrium of our ecosystems better and if you don't understand that matters, you can go sit at the children's table.
Fossil fuels have had and still have plenty of subsidies. The trends are easy to read. Fossil fuels overall price is only going up and efficiency is stagnant, wind and especially solar have consistently gone down in price and up in efficiency. They are more exciting technologies and they appear to have more cost effective room for improvement.
Hydrocarbon fuel cells could change all this. All of a sudden fossil fuel people and clean energy people could get along. I think solid state energy storage is more practical for a long term investment
This study would prove something. As it stands it does not in any way honestly address free will or prove that we have or don't have free will. Even withing the bounds of circle guessing I don't buy into such a leap of faith that the accuracy of circle guessing correlates well with free will.. even just free will of circle guessing.
Their data is there, it is real, but it doesn't prove anything. Like all data, it supports one or more conclusions when applied to that conclusion, but I don't think the data they have on it's own would lead most people or scientists to the conclusion they've presented. I think they've made a grand leap in their assumptions without data the back it up and most likely for the sake of drawing attention and getting funding, but of course that's just a grand assumption in itself.
In any case the data doesn't prove their assumption to any degree that validates the headline's sensational claims. It's not Slashdot worthy.
Windows 10 runs fast for me even runs ok on 2 gigs ram. I'd say it generally runs better than Windows 7 or at least as good. Bootup and shutdown are as fast or faster than Linux distros and return from hibernate is far faster than any Linux install I've seen. Linux isn't good with hibernate yet. Hibernate on an SSD is almost as fast as sleep mode now. Office.. well I have now idea about that. I stopped installing Office at home like a decade ago. Win 10 however is a fine OS, there isn't much doubt about that other than from idiots and nix fanboys I suppose.
Win 10 will get bash shell and android integration soon. It's really just distancing itself from any other desktop competitor right now. Once Windows 10 mobile gets some apps I expect that to catch on as well. It's not awesome, but it's on the road to rapidly being better than Android at just about everything and it's more like a real OS than can scale up, not some pile of code that Google is desperately trying to keep up with.
For time spent in development, Win 10 blows Android and iOS away, we should at least give MS credit for a good desktop OR and a solid mobile offering AND the only even close to unified platform around. If you don't think unified platforms are where we are going.. you're kidding yourself. Fact is MS has the desktop to beat.. end of story there. Google has the most prolific and most HATED operating system on the planet, always sucks to be number 1. Apple has the most well regarded mobile OS, but it's topped out in market share...due to price and lack of integration with windows.
Basically people are in no way giving up their desktops and most of them are not interesting in using Apple and Windows because they know Apple will resist integrating features in some desperate attempt to push their desktop via ipods and smartphones.. both markets that have little long term profitability for the OS makers. Only app makers really keep making money on the mobile platforms. Apple, Google and MS just get to keep supporting them and charging next to nothing.
Once the hype is over people are going to settle on phones for as long as they can, just like they've done with desktop and laptops and the more mature tha pp and hardware gets the less necessary upgrades become, including new apps. Since the mobile market is by definition a limited market.. there is just less money in the long term.. even with replacing phones. Most people will get phones up to a certain feature or price range and they will keep that phone for years if they can.
Since the entry point has to be very low and people don't really need a lot of features on a smartphone. There just isn't a lot of long term future in endlessly making features and apps that people just aren't going to keep needing at anywhere near the rate they have in the last 10 years.
There is a future in integrating those two platforms, but there is not much future in mobile or PC profitability, especially per device or hardware sales. They will remain profitable, just at no where near the rates we've seen over the last 20 years.
Beyond that the future is more gadgets, more integration, more input devices, more ways to display and consume media. Obvious huge markets are voice integration and digital assistants and then onto real automation and robots.
They have the hdd size wrong. Min memory was 8-16 megs expandable to 80.
The hdd for a computer with that much ram would be in the gigs, not in the megs. A computer with only 16 megs hdd would have 640k ram or such, not several megs of ram. Why would you ever have more ram than you have storage, especially before broadband?
Other than consumer level gadgets, they just have never been proven to be even remotely secure. It's Hollywood stuff, like facial scanners. I'm not saying you can't improve those to the point they are very secure, but none of the login gadgets are secure or worth it. The most secure is probably the USB keys, but I think nothing beats a strong password in one place.. the users brain. One point of failure, less vectors of attack, simple and proven to be about as good as it gets.
These login methods have potential as 2 factor logins with a secondary 2 factor in case the technology fails, like picture/voice/fingerprint with a pin backup, but picture/voice and fingerprint are all easy to beat, so you've just opened a backdoor to your device.. there isn't much point. It's added complexity and added code right where you don't want it - in the authentication process. As insecure as phones already are, they don't need added login backdoors with massive vulnerabilities.
It's pretty obvious that supply and demand can't just go on forever. People have relatively static needs overall and science continues to automate our lives.
We will someday need population control.... hate it, love it,, it's gonna have to happen.
There is really no long term stable outcome where rich people go Hunger Games on the poor and can maintain control AND modern luxury. On top of that the dumb masses aren't that dumb and can replicate a lot of tech...like explosives. Soooo.. you hoard what you can while you can before the Great Equalization happens.. because it will.
Automation is coming too fast. That will leave too many people without jobs, shelter or food. The only real outcome at this scale and speed has to be a living wage and YES we are moving toward a world where we just 'pay' people to not be screwups and get their basic needs met.
It's already a solid deal as far as governing masses of people. You set the cost of living low and you basically have a tier of easy living for the old, dumb, lazy, drug users and such. You meet there basic needs with government level wholesale purchasing.
The more people you get on the system the MORE effective it is, not the less. The more control your rules start to have and the more people you can actually kick off the system, but you have to first create a standard of living that people want, not the crime ridden poverty we offer people today.
It costs less to give people safe and energy efficient housing these days than it does to jam them into falling down 100 year old homes that nobody else will live in. We all wind up paying that costs in many ways and it's not even cheaper in the short run, not less in the long run.
I think the main reason is you don't have to charge wired headphones. If they would at least start making quality standardized wireless charging in all this stuff then maybe they'd start to get people to use bluetooth more. As it stands most people seem to avoid it and I think it's mostly because it's just another thing to charge.
If all your gear charged wirelessly on one pad or such it would help increase sales in all markets. Ease of use sells stuff and if you think Apple is some market leader, that just show how pathetically underdeveloped the UI and gadget markets really are. Wireless charging is not expensive at all, but it could use more money and focus from the industry and it's a feature that everyone will want.
Wireless charging also helps with the smartphones greatest nemesis, battery life. If you can buy a couple cheap pads and a QI car mount you can have your phone charging all the time. Apple would be far smarter to go with wifi charging over something uselessly superficial like the fingerprint scanner, which is undoubtedly not secure or necessary for 99% of it's users.
At least with a pin you can refuse to tell someone. With a fingerprint you cannot, both physically and legally. You do not have the right to deny police your fingerprint. You have a 5th amendment right to not give up your password. As for smart features to support in the latest generations of phones, Apple and most Android makers have chosen... poorly. They made the American car company mistake and went uselessly over-the-top as the rest of the world was scaling up efficiency and scaling down costs.
Android and Apple's markets have both stalled for the last 2-3 years and users are losing interesting. All it would take was wireless charging, but NOOoooo. Google wants to take away developers control and apple wants to make silly headphones that nobody asked for. Both of them need to get their heads out of their asses and work on things like voice support and general life automation using are SO CALLED smartphones.
We invested in a platform thinking it would keep rapidly getting better, but the software has completely stalled out and all we get are useless hardware upgrades. Greed does funny things to corporations/people.
Round pin adapters are better and proven. They can't be plugged in upside down and it's fool proof. Nobody asks which way to plug in a round connector. The circular pin shape can take more abuse than a flat thin design.
Why are we still making power adapters than can be plugged in upside down? Is the power cable end and socket lobby that strong?
Voice typing or external bluetooth keyboard would solve that well enough. QWERTY is only ok, it doesn't add enough productivity to really be worth the screen space loss or thickness increase of the phone. We need a better solution and like I said anyone can just get a bluetooth mini keyboard and make it work.
The apps are the main problem. Touchscreens are powerful enough, but developers just still don't know how to code the UIs. We need a lot more swipe based commands, they can be as fast or faster than a mouse when the UI is written well.
Text entry needs to be done with voice typing (or external keyboard) which means all phones need high end mics, not just mics good enough for a phone conversation. A mic array makes the most sense and provides redundancy. ARRAY kind of sounds cool too:)
In any case typing on a tiny screen with your hands on a keyboard is never going to really work well, so we can give up on that. Now maybe we can invent a keyboard with less keys that ppl can get used to.. that is possible, but phones need to be different sizes and people's hands vary wildly in size. It's not easy to make a physical keyboard work for everyone and ppl more or less already said they dont need em.
My Moto Mini cost 108 dollars and can do voice commands in sleep mode, has notfications in sleep mode and wireless charging. I think they are more than cheap enough now. I mean.. Africa can have all our 2 year old smartphones.. that's good enough.
What we need is software that doesn't suck. There isn't even a good music platform on Android yet. If you guys think Spotify doesn't suck a lot, you've lowered your expectations way too far.
I expect mobile apps to be just about as good a desktop apps or I'm going to avoid using them for my desktop because my time is worth money. How many people have spent over a year of their lives already playing on a smartphone? That is kind of ridiculous for such a limit and weak platform.
I hate most mobile apps. They require all kinds of unnecessary button pressing. They put the navigation buttons all over the screen. It's near impossible to make a user interface that can resize and fit anyone hand. We need to more toward voice and swipe commands as much as possible, including voice typing. Instead of me worrying about how much the Spotify, Apple Music, Groove, Google Play apps UIs suck.. just add in voice commands and you can at least head off a lot of problem.
Wht is it taking a decade to get Google to add something like... Add song to Playlist or Delete song from playlist as a default voice command. For YEARS people have been buying apps to add simple voice commands. Google spends almost no real effort on the biggest up and coming feature. Voice Search is slow, it hangs up, often times it does not automate the 'last mile'.
Tons of apps on Android lack swipe controls.. so you have to press tiny buttons depending on the size of you phone. Swipe is the way to go. the entire Android UI needs to be rethought.. not just the OS, but more so than anything the damn apps.
The left side pop out menu button thing sucks balls. It's always 5 clicks to get anywhere in an app in Android and there is no reason for that, tabs work on mobile platforms too you know devv!.
I don't see improvements really happening. Google is going to keep slacking and all of sudden Windows 10 Mobile is going to be a viable platform that because they have no desktop presence on Windows other than that stupid run Chrome in the background option. That's OK if you have Chrome and if you're ok with shitty Chrome apps being your main desktop app.. which doesn't seem to be appealing to most people.
Chrome apps work good.. in chrome.. as extensions to chrome, but when run them as standalone apps, they look and act like a badly written python scripts with a computer science 101 UI overtop it. It's not how big name companies should be presenting their apps. The world is shifting BACK to desktops now that the initial thrill of the mobile platform is ending.
The next stage will be a full integration effort and amazingly on Android phones that is being led by MS, not Google. I consider that to be a serious bad omen for Google. This is the point where Google let their mobile platform grip slip right out of their hands while they sat there pumping out half fnished 'core' apps that they forgot to make right from the start. They should never have been so lenient on Android licensing. It's hurt their brand.
Anyone who hates an Android phone hates Google a little now and everyone who has ever had an Android phone has hated it. I don't honestly think this is accidental. Google is bending you over and app raping you with their marketplace full of crap apps and their OS full of bugs. All the big name app makers are along for the ride also. They too make more money when you waste your life on your phone doing things at 1/3 the speed you used to do them on your desktop or laptop.
We communicate more often, but less meaningfully when our words and ability to input text is limited. Yet another reason quality voice typing is a must. Hardwre makers also need to put in higher quality MICROPHONE ARRAYS on their phones. An array can do a lot more and it's probably more practical than beam focusing.
The only thing that has peaked with smartphones is the need for more hardware in a smaller package. They have officially shrunk down and added most hardware features we need for awhile.
The problem is that the OSs and apps barely scratch the service in what a smartphone COULD do it the UI and apps were refined. It's smart hardware, but really really bad software for the most part. Most apps on Google Play, MS Store or Apple Store are trash.. they are apps designed to make a quick buck more than solve any real problems. Many times making money off of features that are in the OS and ppl don't even know about.
That's not a business model that builds a good customer relationship over time. It's an abusive relationship where Google kind of pushes users into the pool and says.. SINK OR SWIM. We are at the mercy of random fly by night app makers WAY too often on Android. Just look at the trash in the Play Store it should be obvious that smartphone software is very lacking.
Stepping up your brain power an actually imaging where the smartphonere 2.0 platforms are going is a lot more useful and it helps you understand what I mean by software being the real limiting factor. It's key to note that the business models of iOS and Android are the core things making the platforms into entertainment platforms fire and productivity platforms a distant second. In the LONG run a market place can be good, but in the early days it creates a lot exploits and predatory coding. Google has done poorly to regulate this out. Apple has done infinitely better, but not great. MS probably has a far better Mobile OS in the making, but who knows until it's tested more.
To me Windows 10 is what I mean by smartphones 2.0. These are phones designed to more realistically mimic the usefulness of computers and not just iPods. All current phones are more or less modeled after Apple's success with the iPod and iPod Touch. The problem is those are just kids toys.
They are platforms meant to sell us entertainment first and foremost and things like very easy access to feautres are a distant side note on Android and iOS. I hope MS will pressure them into making more realistic mobile platforms that integrate into our desktops correctly.
I don''t think most of you realize your getting screwed by Google and Apple pretty hard. Google is not accidentally funneling users into Google Music. They are 10 times worse than MS ever was at the height of Windows power. Google controls and defines Android and they have broken from the start. You can't use a lot of the features of the phone because the OS locks you out. Then on top of that you can't use a lot of features that developers COULD add in because Google blocks them or steals focus by forcing pre-installed apps designed to get you signed up for 10 bucks a month.
The mobile platforms are entirely for profit platforms. The business models behind them dictate that they are not really tools being made for users. They are platforms being made to sell apps and the priority on that is overwhelmingly in the favor of profits and not a quality product.
Voice commands are not something that should be taking decades to get. Voice commands were possible 20+ years ago on a desktop but nobody thought they were useful enough other than a few companies. MS could have had voice integrated way back in 95 is they had gotten to it. Keyword recognition does not require that much CPU power. Teach users to say the right command and it works.. let the babble stuff and you need a whole datacenter to maybe figure it out.
In any case the problem is Google and Apple and MS not taking the right directions. Phones and desktops are lacking TONS of software features and particularly integration between mobile and desktop. Do you guys never ask yourself why doesn't google make like a GOOGLE app for Windows that would handle all the Android integration at the OS level?
It's because they CAN MINE YOUR MORE when you use Chrome or Android so they don't want to make tools for your desktop. They want you to forget your desktop exists and take 3 times
If they want any hope of attracting top level talent to their field.. plain and simple. When you're that good you get to make your own rules to employment. Why would anyone want to take a pay cut to work for the FBI and deal with all the drug testing and clean desk policy?
They don't pay more and they suck more to work for. There is no upside for people in high demand other than perhaps some kind of power trip, but career wise it would be a step backward for anyone even CLOSE to the top of their field. You should be making several hundred thousand dollars per year or millions if you are really that good, and those goes for just about any field. Top level talent is worth way way more.
K cups are a huge scam and the coffee isnt as fresh or good as the stuff you get in the bags as food stores and such. Many times it's not even as good standard fresh coffee.
There is no way all those little processed cups are going to be as fresh probability wise. They sit around more, they get holes in them, they probably aren't even fully airtight many times. It's a scam because people like gadgets... that simple.
Anyone who really has a taste for coffee is unlikely to think those taste better, so it's really just sad scam for the extremely lazy people. You can probably make a whole pot of coffee, drink one cup, and dump the rest out and still have a lower cost of ownership than the K Cups. The only place that system really shines is in a workplace where you want that extra compartmentalization for all kinds of reasons... hygiene being one of them.
Convenient.. sure. Cheaper.. hell no. Taste better.. nope. You can grind beans in like 30 seconds and blow away 99% of K Cups hardly even trying. The bags are my Walmart are clearly fresher than most any K Cup I've had also. So... yeah.. it's coffee for lazy rich people who like gadgets.. as we all thought.
Google needs to make better apps, plain and simple. The phones are already more than powerful enough and full featured and remember they are only phones. They have to be small so the need to scale them up will always be limited and I honestly think we already exceeded that need. What we see now is just a booming market desperately looking for the magic number to put it's cash on in the form of marketable gimmicks for phones.
Yet, what people clearly want and need is more refined software. The problem is, most of the apps are free and Google doesn't seem to grasp that those core apps are what secures their platform for the future OR what makes it very easy for Windows 10 Mobile to all of a sudden look like a perfectly valid alternative one day, which will happen and will more or less take people by surprise somehow.
The biggest reason for this will just be that Android mostly sucks as a phone platform. They just basically forgot to stay focused on phone features first and foremost. Secondly the UI is just a horrible random mess of whatever and most people don't like that. Third, Google will not focus on core apps, instead they are more worried about redundantly creating apps that they can trust and integrate into their platform.
They created this wonderful open marketplace only to eventually replace all the open apps with their own because they realized that people cannot really trust random developers on the playstore with the kind of data that a mobile platform would eventually require. Now here we are Google's platform is insecure, it's bleed personal info, they're trying to crack down on the playstore, but years of lack of oversight has just left it all a big hot mess.
They'd probably be just as good off taking what they learned and starting it all over from scratch with a focus on UI, core apps and proper branding. Apple has done a better job, but their platform is still in the infant stages. Windows 10 mobile on the other hand is a real platform, it's just not quite finished and needs apps, but the potential it has and the technology behind it is far better.
It's more like a real OS shrunk down and not part of an OS cannabalized and turned into a mobile OS. iOS and Android are more like pieces of code meshed together and Windows 10 is more like mobile platform 2.0 which has learned from their mistakes as well as integrated into the world of Windows desktops which Google and Apple were foolish to not do.
They will soon pay a stock market price for that decision. If I had money I'd buy MS stock. Their mobile OS is clearly better in 1/3 the time or less and most people love Windows 10. It's just a matter of time now.
In many places where you have just one ISP you'd be depriving people of a basic and highly necessary service. That kind of termination of service for something the anti piracy lobbies cannot accurately and honestly pinpoint or prove would just be irresponsible.
There are plenty of scenarios were one person in a home could be pirating without the others consent or knowledge. Yet some silly record and movie company organization thinks it has the authority to demand that service cut off, without investigation or proof?
They are fools and they would wind up facing a class action lawsuit and having to pay millions in damages if they keep trying to strong arm ISPs. Obama's FCC doesn't really mess around. They smacked Verizon down so hard that Verizon is forced to give hotspot access away for free. Thing like internet as a basic utility are HUGE and barely talked about over the sound of tin foil crinkling.
Good luck finding any government that has updated IT security. It's not just the US by any means.
Governments in general always update a bit slower, so this is fully expected that government technology is behind private. We know that, we expect that and we are ok with that.
You can't have it both ways though. You can't expect government to be ahead of private industry in a capitalist system like this. Government CAN tackle the big projects occasionally, but it's not supposed to be cutting edge. Government is supposed to be slow and rather difficult to change. That's a good thing much more than a bad thing.
Any good social change in the world comes over time, so the idea that your government must often be ready for massive reform suggests not that it's flexible so much as that it's unstable. The government is NOTHING MORE than a reflection of the people in any democratic nation.
Anything you hate about government you need to first realize that you hate about yourself first.
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Glue all over your car... for one, it's stupid and nobody is going to buy cars with glue all over them. Secondly, it doesn't present the level of confidence in self driving cars that I would have hoped.
I would love to get personal paid email from Google, but 5 dollar a month is too much in this day and age just for email. I just want gmail without content scanning and ads. I'd pay like 2 dollars a month, but not 5. If google had an office suite to sell me I might go for that. As it stands MS email and Outlook 360 for 5 bucks a month is looking better and better. Google Apps.. aren't worth money and they aren't really designed to be. Gmail sucks compared to other email clients. Google Calandar not being intregrated well is just dumb. Outlook and every other clone of that style interface is still a better designing, including outlook.com I think google would prefer to just data mine and offer lite version of software like they currently do. It's an easy and scalable business model that will probably never get old. Making serious apps means offering serious support. Being a medium for advertising requires very little work from Google to adapt to the market. The market comes to them and throws money at them because they are the top search engine, top email provider and top mobile platform. The problem is their platform sucks and we all pay for it with our time. It's not free.. it's slow and cumbersome and not a google tool for production. Office and Outlook are still far better for their respective uses than anything Google offers. Google needs to mature to higher end apps that mimic desktop apps or I think they will start to lose considerable users to MS. MS is more compelling for the features they offer for the money and most desktop users have to use Windows anyway, so they will continue to have a huge advantage in integration. Google has done nothing to address that. If anything they continue to dodge the problem and rely on their rather immature/lame Chrome app platform. It's great for a browser plug-in architecture, but it's not great for stand alone apps. Google should stop trying to use Chrome for so much. They are over compartmentalizing and underutilizing. They are being too cheap/efficient and they will wind up losing market share at a time where they had the money and influence to hold it. Google needs to go back to focusing on core services ASAP. The platform is dated and not improving.
Either they are creating a bubble or they aren't investing enough in education. They have over a billion people and socialized education. How can they not be able to hire fast enough? The average citizen is still totally poor.. it's not like China is some posh low population density area where you might reasonably have such problems.
That's just using an open document format, not using 'free' software. Public funds don't normally dictate what tools people prefer. Market trends do that. Like.. the government doesn't make everyone use special government funded phones. Government employees mostly use the same phones available from major retailers. The government doesn't have it's own special shovels either and while they are big shovel customer or a big software customer and they should get a say in things.. they don't have a right to dictate that simply because the taxpayers use those items via government. Government has no more right to dictate how software or shovels are made than individuals. If anything government has less rights than people, not more. Government should do what the market trends are doing unless otherwise directly legislated. If everything is using Windows, you use Windows. If everyone is using iPhone, you using iPhone. You don't fight the existing social patterns just because you want to make a name for yourself or your management skills. You will lose. If the government takes over OS and Office software, it has to maintain that code. It has to rapidly patch security holes or RELY on some group or service to do that for them. You don't just write opensource software and walk away because it's opensource. It's still filled with bugs and when used on a large scale it will require support. You can't get away with just user driven forums. You need to be able to provide people real support if they need it. Many businesses rely heavily on office software, maybe even more than governments. If government is going to push a scenario where it controls it's own software, then it's going to have to spend a lot of money to keep that software up to date or at least do private audits of the code often and review all new code. It's better to let private industry develop software and just force them to meet the public's demands occasionally. The idea Windows and Office cost too much is ridiculous. Your desks or cubicle probably costs a couple grand and it's just like junk wood coated with fabric. Your office probably spends more in K-CUPs per week than they spend on IT upgrades per month. It would be nice if Google would go ahead and makeGoogle Docs not suck by pressuring MS to make Office free. I think google knows that MS could just open the flood gate of free online office at any moment and crush all their hard work.. so Google Docs will remain mostly crap. Libre and Open are good enough, but you aren't saving anything. You lose one job or customer because of bad formatting or documents they can't open.. and you've lost a huge amount of that money you're pretending to save... by cannibalizing productivity and user happiness. Also every normal person who uses Office who comes to work for you now has to learn you special opensource way of doing everything... and when they leave they will probably not use the same software you made them use. I don't like how we aren't adding up the cost of forcing users to relearn all this stuff or fragmenting the market.
The problem is retooling does cost money. Libre and Openoffice do have plenty of bugs and lack features some users want. The biggest problem is that MS software just doesn't cost that much. Labor and hardware cost a lot, software is dirt cheap for how much you use it. If you want good software, stop trying to get it for free and instead just send feedback to the companies making the leading products. You can get the latest features without the things you hate this way. The the only real problem with MS Office is that there is no free home version, beside that it is a better office product and products like publisher or powerpoint are years ahead of anything in competing products. I've yet to see anything more compelling than WordPerfect and that did not win against Office then and probably won't for any professional uses now. There isn't any real money to be saved, relative to other savings, by switching to Linux and other open source and the security argument has only lessened. Linux has proven less secure than predicted over the last 5 years and Windows has proven more secure than predicted. Linux is losing the battle of compelling features. Other than paranoia about the NSA and backdoors in MS products, I don't see any real benefit other than general diversification. Users really can hate software changes and they are kind of being made into pawns in this silly battle over a rather small amount of money, often made on principle more than on dollar and ... sense.
I would make sure I was doing what the users wanted, they are the ones expected to use the software and be productive, so they should have a pretty heavy say in things. I think this is not often the case and IT and management make top down decisions that they wind up regretting. Large scale changes like OS and office software or financial software transitions are not fun at all. You really want to be sure you're doing that for ALL the right reasons.
It may have had a good name back in the day, but somebody sold out somewhere and it's just more of the 90% of crap apps on the Play Store.
What about the other 10,000 pollutants in the cities? They forgot to rule those out. Saying that brake dust is bad and X amount of brake dust is released and X amount of cancer exists in the cities is about as much fiction as it is science. That's extremely loose correlation molded into a rather specific headline, could be as much marketing as it is science.
The reason people claim there is a liberal bias is because there are more liberals in America and they make up a larger TV audience. That's why so much programming is liberal and have been for decades. Almost all the news stations have a liberal bias because liberals make up more of the population and have for decades and intelligent conservatives have long known that. That's why they don't want increased voting numbers. They would lose more elections. Even Fox has and started out with almost all liberal programming. The crazy conservative news thing only came later and Fox is the youngest of all the news stations. I think liberal shows with conservative news is a solid propaganda delivery model for mass changing people's minds, even if only a little, propaganda over time does work and often works surprisingly well. That is why trillions per year are globally spent on marketing, even when you can almost never quantify how much the advertising helped your revenue. Liberal news makes more money because it appeals to a larger audience, it's just supply and demand. Demographics are also all going more liberal.. are we supposed to give conservative equal air time just out of tradition now? It's not going to happen. Media is a for profit endeavour, they print what sells and liberal media contains to grow in popularity decade after decade. It's a clear sign of the long term trend of the country. There are no more accurate polls than what people are watching.. TV ratings and torrent downloads are quite accurate views of what people are thinking an interested in at any given time. In any case.. if there was a conservative majority in the US.. there would never have been a liberal media. The two ideas just don't go together at all. Media is controlled by mega corporations most often with conservative CEOs and board members. They want money, so they base their programming mostly off ratings, not political ideology. That may not translate to voting all that well, but if you think the media is liberal then you have to think most of the country is liberal and thus it's only fair that they get a larger chunk of media representation. That's democracy.
Wait and see is almost never a smart strategy for large scale management and it's especially foolish for something like energy where diversity is well proven to be cost effective. Consider how the markets and fuel supplies work. By diversifying you take market leverage away from countries rich in fossil fuels, especially the easy to export kinds... like oil. Wait and see can work great for personal level decisions, because you're only screwing up your own life. It's safe to say that disturbing the chemical makeup of our environment is less than ideal. An electric infrastructure lets of manage the equilibrium of our ecosystems better and if you don't understand that matters, you can go sit at the children's table. Fossil fuels have had and still have plenty of subsidies. The trends are easy to read. Fossil fuels overall price is only going up and efficiency is stagnant, wind and especially solar have consistently gone down in price and up in efficiency. They are more exciting technologies and they appear to have more cost effective room for improvement. Hydrocarbon fuel cells could change all this. All of a sudden fossil fuel people and clean energy people could get along. I think solid state energy storage is more practical for a long term investment
This study would prove something. As it stands it does not in any way honestly address free will or prove that we have or don't have free will. Even withing the bounds of circle guessing I don't buy into such a leap of faith that the accuracy of circle guessing correlates well with free will.. even just free will of circle guessing. Their data is there, it is real, but it doesn't prove anything. Like all data, it supports one or more conclusions when applied to that conclusion, but I don't think the data they have on it's own would lead most people or scientists to the conclusion they've presented. I think they've made a grand leap in their assumptions without data the back it up and most likely for the sake of drawing attention and getting funding, but of course that's just a grand assumption in itself. In any case the data doesn't prove their assumption to any degree that validates the headline's sensational claims. It's not Slashdot worthy.
Windows 10 runs fast for me even runs ok on 2 gigs ram. I'd say it generally runs better than Windows 7 or at least as good. Bootup and shutdown are as fast or faster than Linux distros and return from hibernate is far faster than any Linux install I've seen. Linux isn't good with hibernate yet. Hibernate on an SSD is almost as fast as sleep mode now. Office.. well I have now idea about that. I stopped installing Office at home like a decade ago. Win 10 however is a fine OS, there isn't much doubt about that other than from idiots and nix fanboys I suppose. Win 10 will get bash shell and android integration soon. It's really just distancing itself from any other desktop competitor right now. Once Windows 10 mobile gets some apps I expect that to catch on as well. It's not awesome, but it's on the road to rapidly being better than Android at just about everything and it's more like a real OS than can scale up, not some pile of code that Google is desperately trying to keep up with. For time spent in development, Win 10 blows Android and iOS away, we should at least give MS credit for a good desktop OR and a solid mobile offering AND the only even close to unified platform around. If you don't think unified platforms are where we are going.. you're kidding yourself. Fact is MS has the desktop to beat.. end of story there. Google has the most prolific and most HATED operating system on the planet, always sucks to be number 1. Apple has the most well regarded mobile OS, but it's topped out in market share ...due to price and lack of integration with windows.
Basically people are in no way giving up their desktops and most of them are not interesting in using Apple and Windows because they know Apple will resist integrating features in some desperate attempt to push their desktop via ipods and smartphones.. both markets that have little long term profitability for the OS makers. Only app makers really keep making money on the mobile platforms. Apple, Google and MS just get to keep supporting them and charging next to nothing.
Once the hype is over people are going to settle on phones for as long as they can, just like they've done with desktop and laptops and the more mature tha pp and hardware gets the less necessary upgrades become, including new apps. Since the mobile market is by definition a limited market.. there is just less money in the long term.. even with replacing phones. Most people will get phones up to a certain feature or price range and they will keep that phone for years if they can.
Since the entry point has to be very low and people don't really need a lot of features on a smartphone. There just isn't a lot of long term future in endlessly making features and apps that people just aren't going to keep needing at anywhere near the rate they have in the last 10 years.
There is a future in integrating those two platforms, but there is not much future in mobile or PC profitability, especially per device or hardware sales. They will remain profitable, just at no where near the rates we've seen over the last 20 years.
Beyond that the future is more gadgets, more integration, more input devices, more ways to display and consume media. Obvious huge markets are voice integration and digital assistants and then onto real automation and robots.
They have the hdd size wrong. Min memory was 8-16 megs expandable to 80. The hdd for a computer with that much ram would be in the gigs, not in the megs. A computer with only 16 megs hdd would have 640k ram or such, not several megs of ram. Why would you ever have more ram than you have storage, especially before broadband?
Other than consumer level gadgets, they just have never been proven to be even remotely secure. It's Hollywood stuff, like facial scanners. I'm not saying you can't improve those to the point they are very secure, but none of the login gadgets are secure or worth it. The most secure is probably the USB keys, but I think nothing beats a strong password in one place.. the users brain. One point of failure, less vectors of attack, simple and proven to be about as good as it gets. These login methods have potential as 2 factor logins with a secondary 2 factor in case the technology fails, like picture/voice/fingerprint with a pin backup, but picture/voice and fingerprint are all easy to beat, so you've just opened a backdoor to your device.. there isn't much point. It's added complexity and added code right where you don't want it - in the authentication process. As insecure as phones already are, they don't need added login backdoors with massive vulnerabilities.
It's pretty obvious that supply and demand can't just go on forever. People have relatively static needs overall and science continues to automate our lives. We will someday need population control.... hate it, love it,, it's gonna have to happen. There is really no long term stable outcome where rich people go Hunger Games on the poor and can maintain control AND modern luxury. On top of that the dumb masses aren't that dumb and can replicate a lot of tech.. .like explosives. Soooo.. you hoard what you can while you can before the Great Equalization happens.. because it will.
Automation is coming too fast. That will leave too many people without jobs, shelter or food. The only real outcome at this scale and speed has to be a living wage and YES we are moving toward a world where we just 'pay' people to not be screwups and get their basic needs met.
It's already a solid deal as far as governing masses of people. You set the cost of living low and you basically have a tier of easy living for the old, dumb, lazy, drug users and such. You meet there basic needs with government level wholesale purchasing.
The more people you get on the system the MORE effective it is, not the less. The more control your rules start to have and the more people you can actually kick off the system, but you have to first create a standard of living that people want, not the crime ridden poverty we offer people today.
It costs less to give people safe and energy efficient housing these days than it does to jam them into falling down 100 year old homes that nobody else will live in. We all wind up paying that costs in many ways and it's not even cheaper in the short run, not less in the long run.
I think the main reason is you don't have to charge wired headphones. If they would at least start making quality standardized wireless charging in all this stuff then maybe they'd start to get people to use bluetooth more. As it stands most people seem to avoid it and I think it's mostly because it's just another thing to charge. If all your gear charged wirelessly on one pad or such it would help increase sales in all markets. Ease of use sells stuff and if you think Apple is some market leader, that just show how pathetically underdeveloped the UI and gadget markets really are. Wireless charging is not expensive at all, but it could use more money and focus from the industry and it's a feature that everyone will want. Wireless charging also helps with the smartphones greatest nemesis, battery life. If you can buy a couple cheap pads and a QI car mount you can have your phone charging all the time. Apple would be far smarter to go with wifi charging over something uselessly superficial like the fingerprint scanner, which is undoubtedly not secure or necessary for 99% of it's users. At least with a pin you can refuse to tell someone. With a fingerprint you cannot, both physically and legally. You do not have the right to deny police your fingerprint. You have a 5th amendment right to not give up your password. As for smart features to support in the latest generations of phones, Apple and most Android makers have chosen ... poorly. They made the American car company mistake and went uselessly over-the-top as the rest of the world was scaling up efficiency and scaling down costs.
Android and Apple's markets have both stalled for the last 2-3 years and users are losing interesting. All it would take was wireless charging, but NOOoooo. Google wants to take away developers control and apple wants to make silly headphones that nobody asked for. Both of them need to get their heads out of their asses and work on things like voice support and general life automation using are SO CALLED smartphones.
We invested in a platform thinking it would keep rapidly getting better, but the software has completely stalled out and all we get are useless hardware upgrades. Greed does funny things to corporations/people.
Round pin adapters are better and proven. They can't be plugged in upside down and it's fool proof. Nobody asks which way to plug in a round connector. The circular pin shape can take more abuse than a flat thin design. Why are we still making power adapters than can be plugged in upside down? Is the power cable end and socket lobby that strong?
How much did it cost and what guarantees do we have it won't come back again?
Voice typing or external bluetooth keyboard would solve that well enough. QWERTY is only ok, it doesn't add enough productivity to really be worth the screen space loss or thickness increase of the phone. We need a better solution and like I said anyone can just get a bluetooth mini keyboard and make it work. The apps are the main problem. Touchscreens are powerful enough, but developers just still don't know how to code the UIs. We need a lot more swipe based commands, they can be as fast or faster than a mouse when the UI is written well. Text entry needs to be done with voice typing (or external keyboard) which means all phones need high end mics, not just mics good enough for a phone conversation. A mic array makes the most sense and provides redundancy. ARRAY kind of sounds cool too :)
In any case typing on a tiny screen with your hands on a keyboard is never going to really work well, so we can give up on that. Now maybe we can invent a keyboard with less keys that ppl can get used to.. that is possible, but phones need to be different sizes and people's hands vary wildly in size. It's not easy to make a physical keyboard work for everyone and ppl more or less already said they dont need em.
My Moto Mini cost 108 dollars and can do voice commands in sleep mode, has notfications in sleep mode and wireless charging. I think they are more than cheap enough now. I mean.. Africa can have all our 2 year old smartphones.. that's good enough. What we need is software that doesn't suck. There isn't even a good music platform on Android yet. If you guys think Spotify doesn't suck a lot, you've lowered your expectations way too far. I expect mobile apps to be just about as good a desktop apps or I'm going to avoid using them for my desktop because my time is worth money. How many people have spent over a year of their lives already playing on a smartphone? That is kind of ridiculous for such a limit and weak platform. I hate most mobile apps. They require all kinds of unnecessary button pressing. They put the navigation buttons all over the screen. It's near impossible to make a user interface that can resize and fit anyone hand. We need to more toward voice and swipe commands as much as possible, including voice typing. Instead of me worrying about how much the Spotify, Apple Music, Groove, Google Play apps UIs suck.. just add in voice commands and you can at least head off a lot of problem. Wht is it taking a decade to get Google to add something like... Add song to Playlist or Delete song from playlist as a default voice command. For YEARS people have been buying apps to add simple voice commands. Google spends almost no real effort on the biggest up and coming feature. Voice Search is slow, it hangs up, often times it does not automate the 'last mile'. Tons of apps on Android lack swipe controls.. so you have to press tiny buttons depending on the size of you phone. Swipe is the way to go. the entire Android UI needs to be rethought.. not just the OS, but more so than anything the damn apps. The left side pop out menu button thing sucks balls. It's always 5 clicks to get anywhere in an app in Android and there is no reason for that, tabs work on mobile platforms too you know devv!. I don't see improvements really happening. Google is going to keep slacking and all of sudden Windows 10 Mobile is going to be a viable platform that because they have no desktop presence on Windows other than that stupid run Chrome in the background option. That's OK if you have Chrome and if you're ok with shitty Chrome apps being your main desktop app.. which doesn't seem to be appealing to most people. Chrome apps work good.. in chrome.. as extensions to chrome, but when run them as standalone apps, they look and act like a badly written python scripts with a computer science 101 UI overtop it. It's not how big name companies should be presenting their apps. The world is shifting BACK to desktops now that the initial thrill of the mobile platform is ending. The next stage will be a full integration effort and amazingly on Android phones that is being led by MS, not Google. I consider that to be a serious bad omen for Google. This is the point where Google let their mobile platform grip slip right out of their hands while they sat there pumping out half fnished 'core' apps that they forgot to make right from the start. They should never have been so lenient on Android licensing. It's hurt their brand. Anyone who hates an Android phone hates Google a little now and everyone who has ever had an Android phone has hated it. I don't honestly think this is accidental. Google is bending you over and app raping you with their marketplace full of crap apps and their OS full of bugs. All the big name app makers are along for the ride also. They too make more money when you waste your life on your phone doing things at 1/3 the speed you used to do them on your desktop or laptop. We communicate more often, but less meaningfully when our words and ability to input text is limited. Yet another reason quality voice typing is a must. Hardwre makers also need to put in higher quality MICROPHONE ARRAYS on their phones. An array can do a lot more and it's probably more practical than beam focusing.
The only thing that has peaked with smartphones is the need for more hardware in a smaller package. They have officially shrunk down and added most hardware features we need for awhile. The problem is that the OSs and apps barely scratch the service in what a smartphone COULD do it the UI and apps were refined. It's smart hardware, but really really bad software for the most part. Most apps on Google Play, MS Store or Apple Store are trash.. they are apps designed to make a quick buck more than solve any real problems. Many times making money off of features that are in the OS and ppl don't even know about. That's not a business model that builds a good customer relationship over time. It's an abusive relationship where Google kind of pushes users into the pool and says.. SINK OR SWIM. We are at the mercy of random fly by night app makers WAY too often on Android. Just look at the trash in the Play Store it should be obvious that smartphone software is very lacking. Stepping up your brain power an actually imaging where the smartphonere 2.0 platforms are going is a lot more useful and it helps you understand what I mean by software being the real limiting factor. It's key to note that the business models of iOS and Android are the core things making the platforms into entertainment platforms fire and productivity platforms a distant second. In the LONG run a market place can be good, but in the early days it creates a lot exploits and predatory coding. Google has done poorly to regulate this out. Apple has done infinitely better, but not great. MS probably has a far better Mobile OS in the making, but who knows until it's tested more. To me Windows 10 is what I mean by smartphones 2.0. These are phones designed to more realistically mimic the usefulness of computers and not just iPods. All current phones are more or less modeled after Apple's success with the iPod and iPod Touch. The problem is those are just kids toys. They are platforms meant to sell us entertainment first and foremost and things like very easy access to feautres are a distant side note on Android and iOS. I hope MS will pressure them into making more realistic mobile platforms that integrate into our desktops correctly. I don''t think most of you realize your getting screwed by Google and Apple pretty hard. Google is not accidentally funneling users into Google Music. They are 10 times worse than MS ever was at the height of Windows power. Google controls and defines Android and they have broken from the start. You can't use a lot of the features of the phone because the OS locks you out. Then on top of that you can't use a lot of features that developers COULD add in because Google blocks them or steals focus by forcing pre-installed apps designed to get you signed up for 10 bucks a month. The mobile platforms are entirely for profit platforms. The business models behind them dictate that they are not really tools being made for users. They are platforms being made to sell apps and the priority on that is overwhelmingly in the favor of profits and not a quality product. Voice commands are not something that should be taking decades to get. Voice commands were possible 20+ years ago on a desktop but nobody thought they were useful enough other than a few companies. MS could have had voice integrated way back in 95 is they had gotten to it. Keyword recognition does not require that much CPU power. Teach users to say the right command and it works.. let the babble stuff and you need a whole datacenter to maybe figure it out. In any case the problem is Google and Apple and MS not taking the right directions. Phones and desktops are lacking TONS of software features and particularly integration between mobile and desktop. Do you guys never ask yourself why doesn't google make like a GOOGLE app for Windows that would handle all the Android integration at the OS level? It's because they CAN MINE YOUR MORE when you use Chrome or Android so they don't want to make tools for your desktop. They want you to forget your desktop exists and take 3 times
If they want any hope of attracting top level talent to their field.. plain and simple. When you're that good you get to make your own rules to employment. Why would anyone want to take a pay cut to work for the FBI and deal with all the drug testing and clean desk policy? They don't pay more and they suck more to work for. There is no upside for people in high demand other than perhaps some kind of power trip, but career wise it would be a step backward for anyone even CLOSE to the top of their field. You should be making several hundred thousand dollars per year or millions if you are really that good, and those goes for just about any field. Top level talent is worth way way more.
K cups are a huge scam and the coffee isnt as fresh or good as the stuff you get in the bags as food stores and such. Many times it's not even as good standard fresh coffee. There is no way all those little processed cups are going to be as fresh probability wise. They sit around more, they get holes in them, they probably aren't even fully airtight many times. It's a scam because people like gadgets... that simple. Anyone who really has a taste for coffee is unlikely to think those taste better, so it's really just sad scam for the extremely lazy people. You can probably make a whole pot of coffee, drink one cup, and dump the rest out and still have a lower cost of ownership than the K Cups. The only place that system really shines is in a workplace where you want that extra compartmentalization for all kinds of reasons... hygiene being one of them. Convenient.. sure. Cheaper.. hell no. Taste better.. nope. You can grind beans in like 30 seconds and blow away 99% of K Cups hardly even trying. The bags are my Walmart are clearly fresher than most any K Cup I've had also. So... yeah .. it's coffee for lazy rich people who like gadgets.. as we all thought.
Google needs to make better apps, plain and simple. The phones are already more than powerful enough and full featured and remember they are only phones. They have to be small so the need to scale them up will always be limited and I honestly think we already exceeded that need. What we see now is just a booming market desperately looking for the magic number to put it's cash on in the form of marketable gimmicks for phones. Yet, what people clearly want and need is more refined software. The problem is, most of the apps are free and Google doesn't seem to grasp that those core apps are what secures their platform for the future OR what makes it very easy for Windows 10 Mobile to all of a sudden look like a perfectly valid alternative one day, which will happen and will more or less take people by surprise somehow. The biggest reason for this will just be that Android mostly sucks as a phone platform. They just basically forgot to stay focused on phone features first and foremost. Secondly the UI is just a horrible random mess of whatever and most people don't like that. Third, Google will not focus on core apps, instead they are more worried about redundantly creating apps that they can trust and integrate into their platform. They created this wonderful open marketplace only to eventually replace all the open apps with their own because they realized that people cannot really trust random developers on the playstore with the kind of data that a mobile platform would eventually require. Now here we are Google's platform is insecure, it's bleed personal info, they're trying to crack down on the playstore, but years of lack of oversight has just left it all a big hot mess. They'd probably be just as good off taking what they learned and starting it all over from scratch with a focus on UI, core apps and proper branding. Apple has done a better job, but their platform is still in the infant stages. Windows 10 mobile on the other hand is a real platform, it's just not quite finished and needs apps, but the potential it has and the technology behind it is far better. It's more like a real OS shrunk down and not part of an OS cannabalized and turned into a mobile OS. iOS and Android are more like pieces of code meshed together and Windows 10 is more like mobile platform 2.0 which has learned from their mistakes as well as integrated into the world of Windows desktops which Google and Apple were foolish to not do. They will soon pay a stock market price for that decision. If I had money I'd buy MS stock. Their mobile OS is clearly better in 1/3 the time or less and most people love Windows 10. It's just a matter of time now.
In many places where you have just one ISP you'd be depriving people of a basic and highly necessary service. That kind of termination of service for something the anti piracy lobbies cannot accurately and honestly pinpoint or prove would just be irresponsible. There are plenty of scenarios were one person in a home could be pirating without the others consent or knowledge. Yet some silly record and movie company organization thinks it has the authority to demand that service cut off, without investigation or proof? They are fools and they would wind up facing a class action lawsuit and having to pay millions in damages if they keep trying to strong arm ISPs. Obama's FCC doesn't really mess around. They smacked Verizon down so hard that Verizon is forced to give hotspot access away for free. Thing like internet as a basic utility are HUGE and barely talked about over the sound of tin foil crinkling.
Good luck finding any government that has updated IT security. It's not just the US by any means. Governments in general always update a bit slower, so this is fully expected that government technology is behind private. We know that, we expect that and we are ok with that. You can't have it both ways though. You can't expect government to be ahead of private industry in a capitalist system like this. Government CAN tackle the big projects occasionally, but it's not supposed to be cutting edge. Government is supposed to be slow and rather difficult to change. That's a good thing much more than a bad thing. Any good social change in the world comes over time, so the idea that your government must often be ready for massive reform suggests not that it's flexible so much as that it's unstable. The government is NOTHING MORE than a reflection of the people in any democratic nation. Anything you hate about government you need to first realize that you hate about yourself first.